Lydia Loveless will release the follow-up to 2014’s Somewhere Else this summer. Real, the Columbus rocker’s latest for Bloodshot Records, is the product of a long, hard creative process; she scrapped a whole album’s worth of material before ending up with these deeply felt documents of heartache and loss. Loveless offered some background on the ideas coursing through her latest collection:

Because I feel like I spent my formative years flopping around like a fish, masking pain with substance abuse and somewhat ashamed of who I was — a hayseed, a phony, I felt — it was absolutely necessary for me to become a stronger, more confident human, or I was going to die. Real is my sort of love letter to that realization, that my existence was just as valid as any other.

The public’s first preview of that perspective arrives today in the form of lead single “Longer.” The song is an exploration of adolescent heartache, a tale of burning your breakfast at 11AM after losing someone who “goes to another school.” The delivery system for this story is a melancholy melody backed by crunchy electric guitar chords and piles of wispy oohs and ahs. It’s like the Replacements soundtracking the sad aftermath of Big Star’s “Thirteen” — which is to say, it’s awesome. Listen below.